Joe Ricketts ad blitz has Romney fingerprints

Unlike the controversial aborted pitch for a $10-million attack highlighting Rev. Jeremiah Wright, billionaire investor Joe Ricketts’s new super PAC campaign will use themes and players blessed by Mitt Romney and his allies.

The Ricketts-funded super PAC Ending Spending Action Fund on Monday announced that it would spend $10 million on ads starting this week boosting Romney and another $2 million on ads boosting GOP congressional candidates, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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POLITICO has learned that the team assembled to carry out the campaign overlaps significantly with the one behind the Romney-blessed super PAC Restore Our Future, including election lawyer Charlie Spies, and ad-maker Larry McCarthy.

Ricketts in June donated $100,000 directly to Restore Our Future, and his political adviser Brian Baker has attended Restore Our Future briefings.

But Ricketts also had been considered something of a wildcard in the emergent world of big money politics. He donated $500,000 to the anti-incumbent Campaign for Primary Accountability, which aired ads attacking popular incumbents in both parties, while Ending Spending had used some of the $885,000 he’d donated to support anti-establishment challengers in GOP congressional primaries.

The new Ending Spending campaign will take a much softer tact in its initial ads. They will be based partly on a video the super PAC produced with conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon called “Agents of Change,” in which people tell the camera that they regret their 2008 votes for Obama and plan to vote for Romney in 2012.

“I thought things would change,” says a voter identified only as “Connie,” who says in the video that she voted for Obama in 2008 because “I was very impressed with him.” But, she concludes sadly “Nothing’s changed.”

That theme is similar to one featured in the Romney campaign’s rhetoric, though it’s been urged to sharpen its attacks on Obama.

In addition to Spies and McCarthy, POLITICO has learned that Ending Spending’s effort will include Sarah Taylor Fagen, a Karl Rove protégé who will help with micro-targeting and direct voter contact, media buyer Will Feltus and leading online advertising guru Becki Donatelli.

Just shut up and take it lefties. LOL! Did you all gather your yard sale items for the One?

Stop whining like a little "B" and vote! Your asinine generalizations sound like talking points you may have heard or read somewhere. Some people always seem to look for ways to divide our nation. Left, right, conservative, liberal...it is all nonesense. No one group is totally right or wrong. Vote and keep the rest of your thoughts to yourself.

another act of arrogance by someone intent on purchasing the president's chair in the ongoing war to by the 1% to create an oligarchal idiocracy......he is an idiot intent on putting party in front of country. disgusting but not surprising.

Norquist's wife is a Palestinian Muslim that gives money to terrorists.

Norquist, with his wife, Samah Alrayyes, born Muslim, founded the Islamic Free Market Institute which shares office space in Washington­, D.C. with Norquist’s lobbying firm Americans for Tax Reform. The Islamic Institute was founded with seed money from Abdurahman Alamoudi, a convicted jailed terrorist who pleaded guilty to accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from Libya.

Now, she is employed as a public affairs officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development – and so it appears that yet another Islamist finds employment in a branch of the U.S. government.

Grover Norquist is an advocate for legitimating Shariah Compliant Finance as an ethical alternative to capitalism. And second, Norquist's chosen battle ground for this subversive effort has been and remains the chiefly influence- and lobby-based contracts drawn up through USAID.

Joe Ricketts should concentrate more on the Cubs than Radical Right Wing Nuts. As long as he continues to give ticket money to groups that are determined to destroy our great Nation, then I will not support the Cubs with any of my dollars, and I would urge the good Mayor Emanuel to NOT work with him on Government handouts. If he has enough money to support crazy people, then he doesn't need a government handout. Hypocrite!!

If you are a libertarian, your party did not seat the duly elected Paul representatives at the convention. They did not want to upstage Christey's speech, subtitled all about Christey, or the Romney message more of the same from a draft dodging tax evader who does care about those in uniform.( Until he is reminded that they are out there.)

This is the same guy that is looking for public monies to redo Wrigley Field. Just one more example of the Republican style of privatizing gains and socializing losses. Same thing Mitts did to "rescue" the SLC Olympics, get a ton of federal money to make up for the fundraising shortfalls.

This is the same guy that is looking for public monies to redo Wrigley Field. Just one more example of the Republican style of privatizing gains and socializing losses. Same thing Mitts did to "rescue" the SLC Olympics, get a ton of federal money to make up for the fundraising shortfalls.